As the gender select for the most part only alters pronouns, adding a they/them option shouldn't require too much in the way of dialogue alterations, and makes the game much more welcoming. There's a few folks I'd like to recommend the game to who'd certainly appreciate it.
something something putting the Trans in Transcendence
In favor, and all the more so since it seems like it would be a low-hanging-fruit addition.
Song has been threatening for years to put this ticket up.
Heartily thirded
Okay okay, to be fair
I have been FORGETTING to put this ticket up for years.
I actually can't remember anywhere that gender plays a role in any conversations. Is it simpler just to remove it altogether?
[Deleted by George Moromisato on 21-Nov-2021]
[Response no longer necessary.]
I think a non-binary gender option is a good idea.
Gender doesn't play much of a role, but it does exist. NPCs address the player as male or female ("sir" or "ma'am", for instance) and sometimes NPCs refer to the player in the third person.
Originally, the game made the assumption that genome corresponded to gender. That is, it assumed that if you had XX chromosomes you presented as a woman and were addressed as a woman. The option, was in fact labeled, "genome".
Song was actually the one who convinced me to change that to "gender".
In the fullness of time, we probably want three explicit choices: "culture", "genome", and "gender".
Culture would distinguish between Commonwealth, Sung, Ares, Ringers, etc. Different cultures would have different ideas about gender. Maybe the Ares don't care about gender and everyone is non-binary. Maybe the Ringers are super traditional and only have two genders.
Genome would be useful for neohuman characters, but we could certainly expanded to include intersex elements. Transcendence has some heavy cyberpunk elements, so I don't think this would be wildly out of place.
Lastly, gender would control pronouns, etc. And we could have random defaults based on the settings for culture and genome.
Again, all of the above is for the indefinite future, but I do think we should do it.
Shorter-term, we should at minimum support a non-binary gender.
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Also george, tell me when you want them and I can get you a nice big set of neopronoun resources to throw at the various groups and cultures. ^_^
George, actually intersex is naturally occurring too, not just a future-tech thing. From genotypes (XXX, XXY, X, XYY, XYYY, XXYY, etc), to X/Y gene translocations to other chromosomes, to 'big Y' chromosomes (which is believed to be a product of the average human-Y chromosome reaching the minimum length, at which point it is forced to fully recombine with an X to produce a fused chromosome), to atypical epigenetics, to pre-natal exposure to various plant compounds (or in more modern times, sometimes also industrial or plastics-adjacent compounds) that are chemically similar to the 'sex steroids' (namely estrogen and testosterone but sometimes also others, such as androgen) of mammals. Edit: oh, and dont get me started on listing off intersex, non-binary, and sexual fluidity in non-human species. That is a MASSIVE list to go through.
I think the big thing from a technical standpoint though is to decouple the selection from the 'pre-universe' data that exists on the load-screen, and couple it to the library or adventure data that gets loaded in when an adventure is selected. This will make it much easier to alter. Took a stab at it before because we wanted to include things like a wyvera genome for the living ship adventure, or a 'you are literally playing a specific named character' 4x "adventure" game mode, but it looks pretty entangled with other code at the time and we were too busy with RL work to really get into it.
@Wolfy: Yeah, of course. I elided a bunch of thoughts in between those two sentences. I only meant that cyberpunk often deals explicitly with intersex characters (both naturally and genetically-engineered), whereas other media often does not.
And I totally agree on deferring to the adventure/extensions for the list of genders/pronouns/etc.